Matt Cutts switches everything around and blog still works

Presumably using his decent screen real estate to ensure that all the required windows were open at the same time, Google software engineer Matt Cutts decided he was going to mix things up over the weekend.

• I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks.
• I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com.
• I changed my blog layout to the excellent Thesis theme by Chris Pearson. Previously I was using the Almost Spring theme.
• I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html.

Bit of an experiment and nice to see someone at Google publicly breaking “the rules” of how you should carefully and sequentially move things around.

“Sometimes it’s fun to mix things up. It’s not as if I make any money from my blog, so I don’t mind if my search rankings drop for a while. In fact, it will be a pretty interesting experiment to see what happens with search engines and traffic.”

I moved a bunch of sites from one host to another, but I didn’t dare attempt other changes at the same time. They can wait.